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Hey Gang…

Our marketing manager has requested some info on setting up multiple monitors in our showrooms to display images across them. I’ve never worked with any ‘video walls’ to this point, but I’m assuming it’s a fairly simple process of finding the right hardware that will take the input source and display it across the monitors. Does any here have any experience with a particular brand or type of controller for this?

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Best thing I can think of right now is either a dedicated desktop that has a video card to support multiple monitors in a tiled-format with Digital Signage setup as the software for the advertising side of things.

Digital Signage

Past that, I wouldn’t know where to start.

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It depends on the kind of content you’re looking to show and the size of the “wall”.

It basically breaks down into two types of setups.

The first, more expensive setup, is a dedicated Video Wall, these are usually pretty large (as you’d expect) and use purpose designed monitors and controllers. The usual manufactures make them, LG, Samsung, Sony. From when I was looking at signage for a project a year or so ago LG was “budget friendly” and the controllers they had very essentially plug and play and could either play media off a card or media server.

Solutions like this are going to end up being custom built, so I couldn’t go ahead and say “It’s going to cost X and will do exactly what you need”. To give you an idea of pricing the “Small” screens from LG go for about $4k Retail and you’d obviously be buying at least four of them, because otherwise what’s the point of a video wall :wink: LG uses a software controller for signage, and I believe that also applies to video walls, so you would just need the hardware capable of driving the monitors.

The second, more “DIY” solution, is to just use a beefy PC. Both AMD and nVidia have support for creating a single logical display from multiple monitors. AMD calls it Eyefinity, nVidia calls it Surround. Most, if not all, cards they produce now support this across all of their inputs. It’s a matter of determining how many monitors you need to support, and finding a card that is beefy enough to handle that many connections and the type of data you want to push out (e.g. static images are easy, actual video is going to require some heavy processing).

If you’re looking to do a DIY approach, let us know what you’re looking to display across how many monitors and we should be able to point you in the right direction on what kind of hardware you’re going to need. If that doesn’t sound like a project you want to take on then you’re going to want to start looking for a purpose built solution. I’d suggest partnering up with your go-to reseller (e.g. PCM or CDW) to see what they offer, they should have an inside sales dork that can whip up a system that meets your needs, and hopefully your budget. But of course, be weary of sales guys, they’re going to try and up sell you. Once you have an idea of what they’re suggesting, do a bit of research to see if you really need that much stuff or if you can pull it off with a lower-end model.

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Thanks, Paragraph. I’ll be meeting with the marketing manager on Monday and I’ll find out exactly what type of content he’s looking to display (whether still images or video etc.). It would be a small wall (2x2) so a DYI approach would be doable, but I do think I’ll talk to our CDW rep after we get so more of the details hammered out and see what they can offer.

Thanks for the detailed post and for putting me in the right direction. I’ll be back with more later…

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FWIW, we are putting together a 3x3 wall, which changes the approach. A 2x2 wall will work with an AMD eyefinity card right out of the box. We are looking at the one linked below with 6x mini-DP outputs, which may be overkill for a smaller application. Easy peasy.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195115

edit: 4 output card, slightly cheaper:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195132

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Well,

As far as “small” How small? they make some pretty big screens now, so if they were thinking on doing something like four ~40in monitors then you might want to look into something like this , no bezel and it’s a single screen so you don’t have to worry about the logistics of teaming everything up.

Granted, that’s not really a signage display, but a quick check shows that Samsung and Viewsonic make 80+ inch signage monitors.

Video Wall monitors seem to max out around 55 inches and that doesn’t make much sense when you’re talking about a 2x2 setup (since, you know, 90 inch monitors)

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When you meet with the marketing manager I would emphasize with them about having the right content. I’ve seen too many digital displays and video wall go up with content being an afterthought. This causes it to look horrible and they always blame IT.

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^^^ This is crucial. High resolution content is a must for a big awesome display.

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Good points… Yeah, if he’s thinking 40" monitors, a large 90 inch might be the ticket. I just got a quick phone call today, but wanted to start researching as it’s all new to me. I’ll be sure to get all of details on Monday. And I hear you, Djaxis… Content is KING.

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I would look into a single 80+ inch monitor, it’s going to look cleaner, and the cost of the monitor should be in line with what you’d spend on the four 40’s. You’re going to save when it comes to both managing the content and displaying it. Hook that bad boy up to any desktop and you should be set (depending on the type of content displayed).

Just be careful, the CEO might want a new Monitor when he realizes they get that big :wink:

More often than not the problem isn’t really the fact that the content is an afterthought, causing IT to get blamed but because it’s “too hard” to create the content, or keep it updated. Proprietary systems tend to limit what you can do, or how you do it, so the content looks like butt and never gets updated. Give a designer/marketer a PC and they can do anything they want… unfortunately that often ends up meaning powerpoint, but that’s not your problem now is it :wink:

One thing to keep in mind is that the pixel density on a large monitor is going to be very low, effectively a quarter of what you’d get with a “video wall” but so long as this is far enough away from the viewer (and usually it’s going to be, otherwise you’d use a smaller screen) then it’ll be fine. Something to think about.

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I have been doing digital signage reasearch for the past year and these are my findings.

Use Risevision for digital signage software. Its a free and great program that beats any other Free option out there.

For the pc running them you should get a good workstation pc with a nice graphics card that supports the amount of monitors you need.

For the display I would not get anything but NEC. They are the commercial display and digital signage gods IMO.

Peerless-av will give you the best mounts out there. A little pricy but they are the leaders in the industry.

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Risevision looks great, will definitely check them out

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If you would like a quote comparison or solution support, we would be happy to help!

@joshua-scw

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Hi Steve! You should look into Sharp’s video wall display selection. Our PN-Y series are portrait/landscape compatible, and come with full array LED backlighting. Almost any number of these displays can be joined together to make a video wall and can be controlled through our RS-232C interface or over a network. We also offer mounting hardware bundles to help you get everything up and working properly for both wall and free standing installations. If I can answer any questions for you, I am happy to help out!

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